alumni futures

Community Online: Is It You or the Platform?

Recently, Ryan Catherwood published an insightful article, The Problem with Alumni Network Platforms. As a follow up, Switchboard CEO and co-founder Mara Zepeda added some profoundly important observations in her article, When Alma Mater is Missing.

I also wanted to make a couple specific observations about this critical topic. After more than 25 years on the client side, and another four years consulting, I have spent the last six months working inside the platform provider's world. And in comparing all these viewpoints, I've noticed a few things about "alumni network platforms."

Is it Us or the Platform?

If alumni and students don’t coalesce online, there are several possibilities, which likely exist in various combinations and to various degrees:

1. There is no demand for the platform. You’re answering a question that nobody asked; or they asked, and their answer lies elsewhere online.
2. There is a demand, but your marketing is ineffective and you haven’t generated awareness and understanding. You answered a question that someone asked, but they didn’t hear your answer.
3. People tried out the platform and found it wanting. They heard your answer to their question, but they need a better answer. They are moving on. 

But before you declare success or failure, the first thing to ask is, “Are we helping people do something they actually need to do?”

 

[Community members don't want features – they want results]

 

Take "mentoring" as a current example. Everybody wants a mentoring program. But often there is no clear demand for it. Mentoring seems like it would be helpful, if only some people would ask for it! Kieran Hanrahan at Switchboard has treated this topic in some depth, so I won’t explore it here, but if you’re wrestling with the mentoring topic, I recommend you read his article about "the black box of mentoring."

People Want Benefits, Not Features

Back to helping people do things they actually need to do. You should answer these questions:

Are we helping them do it more easily, more accessibly and more effectively than some other, comparable resource?

Do they know you’re doing it? Did you get the word out?

Does it work? Are you measuring outcomes that represent success to your audience? 

To answer the last question, you must measure your success against community members’ needs. This is tough to do, but it’s important to try. If students join your site looking for internships, then the numbers of internships offered and accepted are the numbers to track. Having a lot of people offer internships, with few takers, is not success. Similarly, signing up mentors is good only if the mentoring leads to improved outcomes and satisfaction.

Alumni organizers should check whether alumni or students want the litany of digital features that some platforms offer. You thinking “that’s so cool!” should not be the selection criterion. Ryan lists some of these features - an alumni directory, photo galleries, job boards, mentoring, e-newsletters, groups and discussion forums. Some institutions will also have merchandise sales, membership dues collection, event registration and calendars. 

Some of these features do enable successful outcomes. But your community members don’t want features. They want results - jobs, housing, advice, referrals and sometimes, merchandise or services. Unfortunately, many software features are just bells or whistles that don’t help your audience members do what they really need to do.

Problems with LinkedIn

Ryan also mentioned that LinkedIn is “a better and more important tool” for “network-building and communicating with new contacts.” I was one of LinkedIn's very early users (about the 34,000th LinkedIn member out of the more than half a billion profiles now on LinkedIn. I joined in 2003!). My experience is that most LinkedIn users interact very little.

LinkedIn has great potential value, mostly because of its massive user base. However, LinkedIn is also infamous for its clunky communication interface, and for its cumbersome, hard to find, sparsely populated group discussions. LinkedIn makes it easy for individuals to sign up and fill out a profile. Everything else on LinkedIn is hard for the average user. If LinkedIn were truly effective, you might not want a third-party platform at all.

 

[This is a great time to ask, "What are stakeholders looking for,
and are we providing it?"]

 

LinkedIn is dropping the ball when it comes to alumni and students asking for help – or offering to help. Why? Because LinkedIn's communication tools are awkward and badly designed. Its alumni feature is difficult to locate, and its Groups have been hobbled and hidden as well.

So if alumni feel that LinkedIn really is "better and more important" than your own tools, you can definitely be doing more.

Building Awareness & Meeting Needs

Finally, back to marketing and building awareness. If you aren’t allocating resources to communicate the benefit of your platform, then the answer to Ryan’s original question is partly, “It’s you, not the platform.” But if community members do sign up only to find that your platform is hard to use, marginally beneficial and unpopulated – they will leave. Forever.

Yes, you have to market events and other activities, but increasingly, the opportunity cost of doing so is too high. This means every dollar or hour you spend promoting an event is at the cost of undermining your other efforts. Including your digital engagement. 

Is that worth the risk? No! But what can you do? Well, start by doing fewer events (you're probably only attracting five percent of your audience to them anyway – at great cost in budget and staff time). Spend less on print. Segment communications more. Expect less from your legacy website. And re-write a team member's job description to include “network weaving” and brokering relationships, to build deeper (not just more) connections with stakeholders.

There's no silver bullet, but taking a cue from Ryan's questions, this is a great time to answer the questions, "What are stakeholders looking for, and are we providing it?"

Is a University a Cause?

I recently came across a podcast (from Achieve). The title caught my attention: 

University is a Cause.

[Scroll down to play the 10 minute podcast, or visit Achieve's Podcast page.]

They rightly point out that in the eyes of students and alumni (especially recent ones), a university is not a cause. This helps explain why it's increasingly difficult to attract and retain these individuals as donors.

The folks at Achieve would agree with that, but I wonder whether their prescription for addressing this will be helpful in the long run. A key component of their advice is that universities should use "cause-type language" in messaging and solicitation.

The problem?

Sounding like a cause does not make you a cause. And donors know this.

Universities exist largely to enable the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. While that has the makings of something broad, societal and over-arching, to accomplish this goal universities are organizations first, and causes second – if at all. Therefore, they generally lack the immediate impact, broad appeal, and problem-solving identity that characterize social causes.

[Sounding like a cause does not make you a cause – 
and donors know this]

Donors know that a gift to alma mater is generally an indirect way to promote renewable energy, eradicate poverty, alleviate hunger, reduce violence, or decrease pollution. 

Of course, universities must raise money! And Achieve's overall assessment is valid. But it can't address the underlying attitudes and expectations of the Millennial prospects that this advice targets.

Doing that will require:

• a change in the student experience itself,
• a change in the stated purpose of alumni organizations, and
• a change in the way universities align their work with that of other world-changing organizations. (I will write much more about this last point in the near future.)

A university is not primarily a cause, it's an organization (or a group of organizations). But by connecting with other organizations and contributing part of the solution to global problems, a university's researchers, students and alumni can support outcomes that transcend the needs of a single institution.

And when they do, they will be much more relevant and engaging to their alumni and donors. 

What do you think – is a university a cause? Leave a comment.

 

 

 

Six Recent Innovations in Alumni Relations

An anonymous user recently asked the following question on the "answer site" Quora.com:

What are some innovations in the way that universities are handling their alumni relations?

My answers might be "trends" instead of "innovations," but it's clear that these changes are underway or well-established.

We've seen the following in the last decade or so:

• Increased connections between the alumni office and fundraising (e.g., combining alumni staff with annual fund staff; including the alumni association in campaign plans).
   
• More emphasis on career services, networking help, and professional success for alumni. More coordination with the campus career center.
   
• Educating students more intentionally about their future as alumni, well before they graduate and become alumni themselves.
   
• Steadily evolving regional structures. The traditional "chapter" or "club" with a board, a newsletter, regular meetings, and bylaws is evolving into a less structured, adaptable and responsive "network."
   
• Using social media and other digital channels as "listening posts" to learn what alumni care about and what they need. Less of the old fashioned broadcasting of institutional news.
   
• Increasing reliance on third-party digital tools to deliver content and services online. More companies with apps and platforms designed to drive alumni engagement.  
   

These trends are not universal, nor are they growing uniformly. However, they represent the overall shift that alumni programs must make as alumni themselves do more things on their own that had been the sole province of the alumni office or association (e.g., broadcast communication; event planning; fundraising; finding former classmates).

What other innovations do you see, and how are you incorporating them? Leave a comment.

Related link: My original answer on the Quora site.

Photo by Sarah McGee Via Creative Commons 

 

The Future (Part II): The Changing Student Experience & Alumni Relations

This is the second of three articles that I have adapted from my alumni relations keynote at CASE V in Chicago, in December 2013. The title of my talk there was Alumni Relations & Advancement's Future: 3 Questions.

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In the first article in this series, I discussed fundraising's relationship with alumni relations. The final article looks at predicting the future of alumni relations. Here in part II we ask: 

How will the changing student experience
affect alumni relationships? 

Observers are buzzing about several so-called disruptive factors in education. Some of these factors influence the student experience, which in turn affects alumni attitudes and engagement. Here are four that we must think about:

1. MOOCs
Massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, are widely touted to be changing the face of traditional education. They are certainly a departure from the traditional face-to-face classroom: students enroll, usually for free or almost free, and pursue their chosen topic alongside 50,000 or 100,000 other learners. And they do it from the comfort of their laptop or their iPad.

MOOCs' short-term impact on the traditional degree is probably overstated, but their evolution is certain to influence our field.

So far, these online students are not earning degree credit. In fact, according to one recent survey, about 80% of MOOC students already have a traditional degree. And MOOCs are being criticized for their students' low completion rates. But MOOCs are a waypoint en route to some more robust future online educational experience. As the successors of MOOCs become the norm for students enrolled in post-secondary education, the students' sense of loyalty, community, or gratitude to a particular institution is going to diminish – or even disappear. So those of us whose work depends heavily on the residential campus experience must anticipate this challenge.

How do we connect meaningfully with alumni whose education took place online – in their office, in a coffee shop, or on an airplane?

[How do we connect with alumni whose
education took place in a coffee shop?]

2. The Changing Student Profile
Second, the typical student's profile is changing. No longer are the majority of university-goers fresh-faced twenty-year olds. Mid-career changers, single parents attending part time, and those just looking for intellectual enrichment may consider themselves alumni of whichever online platform delivered their favorite lectures. In fact, they may consider themselves alumni of the platform itself, and not a particular institution. Will this diverse body of learners want an alumni organization to connect them with job opportunities, with other learners, or with additional instruction? If so, the traditional affinity model of alumni relations has to evolve, or students will abandon it. 

As the student profile changes so must our profession change. Among the services alumni organizations currently provide, career services and access to specialized networks will be the ones most relevant to alumni of non-residential programs. And they are already proving to be among the most relevant services for alumni of traditional institutions.

3. Expectations of Employment
Criticism of higher education is increasing. The most strident voices are those that reject the rising price tag of a college education.

But another group of critics may cause more stress and challenge for alumni professionals. Those are the people who increasingly want our institutions to somehow ensure jobs for graduates. And those people include the parents of many current undergraduates. The parents are footing much of the bill, assuming debt, and staking their family reputations on the extent to which their sons and daughters turn an expensive and time consuming college degree into a lucrative career.

The root of these complaints is an assumption made before a student even selects a university: that the purpose of a college degree is to help the graduate obtain "a good job" that pays well. Increasingly, this is the definition of alumni success, and increasingly it forms the backbone of numerous rankings and reports, which compare college outcomes on how much a new graduate can expect to earn. We hear little about rankings based on a graduate's inherent satisfaction with a college education, or on the extent to which the college experience turns a young and impressionable student into a contributor to her community. (Notably, the Gallup-Purdue Index will combine the "jobs" factor with the "life satisfaction" factor, measuring "great careers and lives that matter.")

If the student's primary concern is with compensation, alumni satisfaction will be at the mercy of the marketplace. However, the sheer number of students enrolled in fields that do not promise lucrative job offers suggests that the humanities, the liberal and fine arts, and the social sciences are not going away soon. And the passion those students have for their topics will continue for many years to give alumni offices the raw material they need to shape newly minted alumni into passionate and generous supporters of our institutions.

[If the student's concern is compensation,
alumni satisfaction is at the mercy of the marketplace]

4. Internationalization
Finally, a fourth dynamic is influencing the future of alumni relations: the diverse national backgrounds of students.

As students find it more appealing and easier to enroll across borders, the student body becomes ever more international. At my institution (all locations), almost 40% of enrolled students came from outside the United States in 2012. Many overseas students in North America have English as a second language, and their language proficiency heavily influences their student experience. They are in an unfamiliar land with strange customs and unexpected influences. In this situation, most of us would prefer the company of classmates whose language, backgrounds, and cultural references match our own.

These students often travel back to their home country as new alumni, without having truly joined our institutions' broader community. As alumni, they are much less likely to respond to the same messages and images that generate engagement with so many "traditional" alumni.

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The challenges and changes I've listed here are only a few of the forces guiding the evolution of alumni relations. Other trends, such as the demographics of younger generations, will add additional fuel and data to future discussios.

Many of us may not feel like we have time to think about the futures these trends are creating. But observing the profiles and experiences of current students may determine our success at engaging the attention and enjoying the support of these students during their lives as alumni.

 

The third and final part of this series will ask, "Can we predict the future of alumni relations?"

Related articles

The Future (Part I): Fundraising's Relationship to Alumni Relations

Alumni as Volunteer Course Facilitators: 7 Reasons it Makes Sense

The future of MOOCs

R.I.P. ALUMNI-L: CASE Rolls Out New Online Communities

[Updated December 17, 2013: CASE's archive of ALUMNI-L messages will not be available after December 31, 2013, according to CASE.]

For 25 years the software called Listserv has powered millions of e-mail based discussion groups. CASE has relied on the software to host a number of specialized discussion topics since the late 1990s.

Now the professional organization is moving its members' online discussion to an entirely web-based platform, and today, the alumni relations discussion moves there. The home page for all of CASE's new online discussions (for CASE members) is here:

CASE Communities Home Page

I created ALUMNI-L back in the early 1990s while working at Brown University ("L" in the name stands for the "list" of members receiving each other's emails on relevant topics). A few people from the annual Ivy Plus alumni relations conference wanted to communicate year-round, and I volunteered to create a way for them to do that. Listserv made it easy. The group started with perhaps eight members, and over time we invited our co-workers to join. Soon, people from other institutions were asking to participate, and in under a year we had an international discussion going.

[I created ALUMNI-L with eight members in the early 1990s...
Today it has more than 2,000 members]

In 1998 I asked CASE to take over ALUMNI-L, and they agreed. The list had more than 1,300 members at that time, and today, as CASE retires the list, it has more than 2,000. Before CASE took over, ALUMNI-L was even the subject of a dissertation written by a University of South Carolina doctoral student!

Today ALUMNI-L goes away, and list members (and others whom CASE expects will find the content relevant) have received their welcome message via the new system. CASE expects the new web-based alumni relations discussion to be available to approximately 9,500 individuals worldwide.

Despite the wording of CASE's message about the transition, every message on ALUMNI-L since August of 1998, when CASE took over, is easily searchable on CASE's own servers. But they also point out that the new system supports document sharing and other features not available before. The new system has site-wide search; member profiles, and more intuitive control over how and when one receives messages.

[Today CASE replaces ALUMNI-L with a new online community] 

Using the System
Many of the same "best practices" for using ALUMNI-L apply to this (and any) online discussion forum too. To get the most out of it, keep in mind the following suggestions:

1. If you ask for links or referrals, instruct others to send them to your email address, not to the entire list. Promise to compile and share what you learn. Later you can send a brief summary of your findings to the entire list. This is how you repay other members' generous information sharing, and it will dramatically decrease the number of messages others need to scan and wade through every day.
   
   
2. Never post a message that says (in effect), "Me too." If someone asks for information, everyone else will see the response when it's eventually posted. 

Good luck to CASE with its new format for discussion, and sincere thanks to everyone who gave ALUMNI-L an unexpected 19-year run as the central forum for global discussions about alumni relations.

Related Link

• Welcome message to new community (CASE member login required)

3 More Questions (and Answers) on Alumni Engagement

During our Higher Ed Live online discussion about alumni engagement, we answered a few questions from readers and viewers. But we didn't get to all of them. Here are answers from Charlie Melichar and Andrew Gossen to some additional comments and questions.

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Question:
How can our offices become proactive and future-thinking, versus playing catch-up (e.g., LinkedIn replacing alumni directories)?

Charlie:
Start with a clean slate. We still view problems through the lens of old solutions. Look at the news business, for example. The industry was so entrenched in papers as the delivery vehicle, they were slow to adapt to a new model to do what was ultimately most important – deliver information in the most timely way possible. We need to focus on the need, the opportunity, or the problem – and be open to changing our ways. People want a network, not a directory. People want a job, not a careers program. People want to make an impact, not a gift. How can we facilitate all of this?

Andrew:
You can’t do this unless there’s someone in your shop whose job is to pay attention to how the world is changing. They need the time to do this, and they need the experience and perspective to recognize emerging opportunities. In Cornell Alumni Affairs & Development, we ask two questions when new opportunities present themselves:

1.       Does the opportunity enable us to pursue an existing strategic goal more efficiently or effectively than we are doing now?; and

2.       Is there an emerging critical mass of alumni activity that warrants our involvement? 

Charlie’s focus on value from the user’s perspective is also essential. We aren’t employed to perpetuate ourselves and our programs; we’re employed to engage our audience. Focusing on our alumni and their evolving needs will make it much less likely that we’ll be left behind.

[Melichar: "People want a network, not a directory. People want a job, not a careers program. People want to make an impact, not a gift."]

Question:
Most donors engage without having to "be present." They send a check whenever they want. What are some non-financial analogs to this?

Charlie:
Social media is a great example of asynchronous engagement. People pick and choose the content that is meaningful them, from the sources they care about, and then do “something” with it. They like it, share it, mash it up. We need to get away from only counting engagement when it happens on our own terms (e.g., events we organize, conversations we convene) and find mutually beneficial ways to join with our constituents.

Andrew:
As Charlie suggests, it’s content. Social media. Archived video. Asynchronous games. Infographics. Memes. High-quality, on-demand engagement is a great fit with today’s highly digital lifestyle.

We could also focus on the convener role, trying to connect alumni so that they can engage with each other when it’s convenient for them, around their priorities. We make the introduction and get out of the way.

[Gossen: "Emerging platforms & techniques blur the distinction between giving and other modes of engagement – the boundaries start to collapse."]

Question:
In fundraising, should we just count donors and not worry about dollars? It's much easier to measure...

Charlie:
It depends on what you’re counting and why, but both are critical. There are engagement models that would take size of gift, whether it is a first-time gift, renewal at a higher level, and so on, as engagement measures. This underscores that there is no "one-size fits all" model. We need to tie these measures to institutional and program-level goals. That’s the way to stay relevant and nimble.

Andrew:
Emerging platforms and techniques blur the distinction between giving and other modes of engagement so thoroughly that the boundaries start to collapse. Take crowdfunding, for example. A $25 donation is definitely "giving." But receiving an almost-instant thank you from someone involved with the project is both stewardship and person-to-person engagement. The frequent, informal updates sent to donors by the project team are stewardship, but they’re also communication that fits well with culture of the social web. This may complicate measurement, but it almost certainly will better engage the donor. 

§

Related articles

Online Discussion: Higher Ed Live Explores Alumni Engagement

Online Discussion: 'Higher Ed Live' Explores Alumni Engagement

Archived video of our April 2013 discussion, available on YouTube (direct link: http://youtu.be/MqVIV6P9ZG4) 

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The video embedded in this blog post is a recording of a live online discussion about measuring alumni engagement. It took place April 18, 2013, as part of Higher Ed Live, a series that explores topics across higher education.

This program included two panelists besides me, Alumni Futures advisory group members Charlie Melichar (Vanderbilt University) and Andrew Gossen (Cornell University). Using my recent blog post about The Risk in Measuring Alumni Engagement as a starting point, and guided by Ryan Catherwood of the University of Virginia, we discussed a range of topics, including using data, choosing metrics, fundraising as an alumni relations outcome, social media, and more. 

[...a free, online conversation about alumni engagement, with 
Andrew Gossen, Charlie Melichar, and me]

Your panelists are all on Twitter as well:

Andy Shaindlin (that's me) – Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations & Annual Giving, Carnegie Mellon University. Twitter: @alumnifutures

Andrew Gossen – Senior Director for Social Media Strategy, Alumni Affairs & Development, Cornell University. Twitter: @agossen

Charlie Melichar, APR – Associate Vice Chancellor, Communications, Vanderbilt University. Twitter: @melicharlie

Our moderator (also on Twitter) was Ryan Catherwood of the University of Virginia (@RyanCatherwood).

Note: I will also be addressing this general topic at the CASE Summit in San Francisco, July 14–16, 2013 (where Andrew Gossen is speaking, too!). 

 

Related articles

The Risk in Measuring Alumni Engagement

Relationship-Building Doesn't Scale

The Problem
Recently, Peter Maher of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand made the following point in a LinkedIn discussion:

E-mail opened up a wonderful new world of alumni engagement, especially for a university...that has a significant number of alumni around the globe. However...each year I receive exponentially more email correspondence from alumni that require a personal response from me.

It's now taking up most of my time just reading and replying to emails in a considered way that deepens the relationship (rather than giving generic/glib replies). What is the best way of getting the most out of e-mail correspondence with alumni without it becoming your sole accomplishment for the day?

Peter's question illustrates something true of all forms of relationship in all contexts:

Relationship-building doesn't scale.

As the number of relationships increases, converting them into traditional, mutually beneficial outcomes becomes more difficult. Peter points out that a generic or shallow reply won't help an alumnus solve a problem or make valuable connections. But one person in his role can only support so many relationships. 

So what can one do?

[There are two obvious strategies – and one non-obvious one]

Possible Solutions
There are two obvious strategies, each of them somewhat challenging:

1. Exchange the creation of new relationships for fewer – but deeper – relationships;

or

2. Add staff to create and foster additional relationships, while supporting existing ones.

If you can document engagement opportunities lost to lack of time and attention, you can craft a business case for greater resources – new staff positions and bigger budget. But even with a good business case, for most of us, the additional funds just aren't there. Many alumni offices have had to cut staff; adding new positions is a fantasy.

This prompts me to propose a less obvious strategy:

3. Convert staff positions from traditional roles to online support and interaction roles.

What if someone in Peter's situation had 3 or 4 staff "replying to emails in a considered way that deepens the relationship"? His office could keep pace with the demand for written communication and support. This would mean changing some team members' job descriptions to reflect the increased reliance on online interaction (including email, the web, and social platforms).

[Do we spend too much time emailing our alumni – or not enough?]

In practical terms, maybe it means fewer events, less printed communication, or a more modest web presence. The payoff in return would be individualized, thoughtful, and relevant communication with alumni everywhere.

Two Final Thoughts
FIrst, alumni relations is communication. Even if they're not attending events or interacting with you in person, alumni feel engaged if they have an open line of communication with their alma mater. (More about this in a future post.) 

FInally, our communication with individuals need not solve their problems directly. We should connect them with resources that they can use to solve their own problems ("teach a man to fish..."). Acting as a relationship broker will decrease our time spent on an individual's needs, and show alumni how to use the network for future problem-solving. 

What do you think?

Too much time spent emailing with alumni? Or not enough?

How do we balance face to face interaction with the reality that we interact meaningfully with just a small fraction of our audience?

Do You Need Permission to Publish Alumni Notes?

Can you publish any public information about an alumnus in the form of a class note?

An acquaintance recently said he was "mortified" that his alma mater had found some information about him online (probably in another organization's newsletter), and then re-purposed it as class news in the Alumni Notes.

My first thought was, "So what?" If you publish an article, win an award, or keynote a conference, people are going to talk about it, and it will likely be published on someone's website. And if it's on a public site, it will be indexed by Google and will be searchable. Or it will turn up on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, without breaching any privacy policy or Terms of Service. 

My acquaintance explains that "including that note implies that I wrote that in to the office and volunteered that information to be published in those pages." The point, he said, is not whether the information is public – it's whether he would want it broadcast to his alumni community. The answer to that is impossible for the alumni office to know, without asking him.

["It implies that I volunteered that information
to be published in those pages"]

Does your institution have a policy for this? Is it easy for alumni to find and understand that policy? Do you get complaints from alumni whose news you collected elsewhere and re-published (either in print or online)? 

I posed this question on the Alumni Futures Facebook page, where one reader described a combination of approaches:

[We use] news submitted by alumni, news submitted by their employers (usually about promotions, awards, etc.), and news from stories in the press that mention the alumnus/alumna and his or her affiliation with the university.

Another reader said:

The major caveat is that the alumnus/subject must verify and approve before printing.

What's your view?

Leave a comment.

 

Image by Sean MacEntee via Creative Commons.

Focusing on ROI is Selfish

Higher ed communications leader (and Alumni Futures advisory group member) Charlie Melichar periodically speaks about social media's place in advancement. At a conference in 2010, an audience member asked Charlie about "getting more alumni to spend time with our Facebook presence." 

Charlie replied:

Don't worry so much about whether a few more people spend two minutes a day with your Facebook content. Get the people who already spend two minutes to spend a few more minutes a day. Don't focus solely on ROI. Focus on ROA – Return on Attention.

Charlie urged us to make our existing supporters' experience more rewarding, instead of only trying to attract more fans and more followers. 

At the 2012 CASE Summit, I had a moment of clarity about why this made sense. Charlie was on stage again, this time discussing technology with MIT's Sherry Turkle. She had just described how technology can isolate us from one another, hindering genuine interaction. The discussion sparked my memory of Charlie's earlier remarks, and I suddenly realized why I found his advice appealing. In a nutshell:

Measuring ROI means assessing the value we get from our investment in online engagement.

Measuring ROA focuses on the engagement's value to our audience.

You should assess whether your organization is using its resources wisely, and ROI is one way to approach that.

However, "return on attention" puts the audience first. That's a worthwhile goal for those of us trying to connect with our audience in ways that matter to them.

 

Related Link:

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
by Sherry Turkle